Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

Colette was at her side, her voice nervous, oh God, Al, bending over her now. Colette’s breath was against her face, polythene breath, not unpleasant but not either quite natural. “Al, is it your heart?”

She felt Colette’s tiny bony hand sliding under her head, lifting it. As Colette’s wrist and forearm took the weight, she felt a sudden sense of release. She gasped, sighed, as if she were newborn. Her eyes snapped open: “Switch on the tape again.”

Breakfast time. Colette was down early. Listening to Alison while the tape ran—Alison crying like a child, talking in a child’s voice, replying to spirit questions Colette could not hear—she had found her own hand creeping towards the brandy bottle. A shot had stiffened her spine, but the effect didn’t last. She felt cold and pale now, colder and paler than ever, and she nearly threw up when she came into the breakfast room and saw Merlyn and Merlin stirring a ladle around in a vat of baked beans.

“You look as if you’ve been up all night,” Gemma said, picking at the horns of a croissant.

“I’m fine,” Colette snapped. She looked around; she couldn’t very well take a table by herself, and she didn’t want to sit with the boys. She pointed imperiously to the coffeepot on its hotplate, and the waitress hurried across with it. “Black is fine.”

“Are you lactose intolerant?” Gemma asked her. “Soya milk is very good.”

“I prefer black.”

“Where’s Alison?”

“Doing her hair.”

“I’d have thought that would have been your job.”

“I’m her business partner, not her maid.”

Gemma turned the corners of her mouth down. She nudged Cara conspiratorially, but Cara was unfolding the papers to see the funeral pictures. Mandy Coughlan came in. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her lips compressed. “Another one who’s had a bad night,” Gemma said. “Princess?”

“Morris,” Mandy said. She rummaged bad-temperedly at the breakfast buffet and slammed a banana down on the table. “I’ve passed the whole night under psychic attack.”

“Tea or coffee?” the waitress said.

“Got any rat poison?” Mandy said. “I wish I’d had some last night for that little bastard. You know, I pity Alison, I really do, I wouldn’t be in her shoes for any money. But can’t she get him under control? I’d hardly got into bed before he was there trying to pull the duvet off me.”

“He always did fancy you,” Cara said, flapping the newspaper. “Ooh, look at poor little Prince Harry. Look at his liddle face, bless him.”

“Pulling and tugging till nearly three o’clock. I thought he’d gone, I got out of bed to go to the loo, and he just jumped out from behind the curtains and put his filthy paw right up my nightie.”

“Yeah, he does that,” Colette said. “Hides behind the curtains. Alison says she finds it very annoying.”

Alison winced in a moment later, looking green.

“Oh, poor love,” Mandy breathed. “Look at her.”

“I see you didn’t manage to do anything with your hair after all,” Cara said sympathetically.

“At least she doesn’t look like a bloody pixie,” Colette snapped.

“Tea, coffee?” the waitress said.

Al pulled her chair well out from the table and sat down heavily. “I’ll get changed later,” she said, by way of explaining herself. “I was sick in the night.”

“Too much of that red,” Gemma said. “You were sozzled when you went up.”

“Too much of everything,” Al said. Her eyes, dull and downcast, rested on the dish of cornflakes Colette had placed before her. Mechanically, she picked up a spoon.

“That’s nice,” Gemma said. “She gets your cereal for you. Even though she’s not your maid, she says.”

“Could you just shut up?” Colette enquired. “Could you just give her a minute’s peace and let her get something inside her?”

“Mandy—” Alison began.

Mandy waved a hand. “Nugh about it,” she said, her mouth full of muesli. “Id nig. Nobbel self.”

“But I do blame myself,” Al insisted.

Mandy swallowed. She flapped a hand, as if she were drying her nail varnish. “We can talk about it another time. We can stay in separate hotels, if we have to.”

“I hope it won’t come to that.”

“You look done up,” Mandy said. “I feel for you, Al, I really do.”

“We were up talking till late, me and Colette. And other people came through, that I used to know when I was a kid. And you know I said, para-militaries were tormenting me? The thing is, they broke through and smashed up my feet. I had to take two Distalgesic. By dawn I was just dropping off to sleep. Then Morris came in. He yanked out the pillow from under my head and started boasting in my ear.”

“Boasting?” Gemma said.

“What he’d done with Mandy. Sorry, Mandy. It’s not that—I mean, I didn’t believe him or anything.”

“If he were mine,” Gemma said, “I’d get him exorcised.”

Cara shook her head. “You could control, Morris, you know, if you were to approach him with unconditional love.”

Colette said, “Could you manage a tomato juice, Alison?”

Alison shook her head, and put down her spoon. “I suppose we’re in for another day of the princess.”

“Another day, another dollar,” Merlin said.

“Snivel, bloody snivel,” Al said. “Do they ever think what it’s like for us? Down I go, whoosh . Plunged head first into their shit. Like a lavatory brush.”

“Well, it’s a living, Al,” Mandy Coughlan said, but Cara, startled, dropped her knife on the Mail ’s Full-Colour Tribute and smeared butter on the Prince of Wales.

Last night, Saturday, the first card Al had laid down was the Page of Hearts: significator of her pale companion, the emblem of the woman who appeared in the cards at the Harte and Garter, Windsor, on the morning when Colette first came into her line of vision: white hair, pale eyes, red-rimmed like the eyes of some small scurrying pet you ought to be kind to.

She looked up, at the woman, the client, who was sitting there sniffling. The reading Al was getting was close to home, it was for herself, not for the client before her. You can’t control the cards; they will only give the messages they want to give. Here’s the King of Spades, reversed: probably, what was his name … Gavin. Colette is aching for a man to come into her life. Nighttimes, she can feel it, in the flat at Wexham, the slow drag of desire beyond the plasterboard wall. Colette’s busy little fingers, seeking solitary pleasure … . What turn of fate brought Colette my way? Did I take up with her for my own advantage, for an advantage not yet revealed even to me: for some purpose that is working itself out? She pushed the thought away, along with any guilt that attended it. I can’t help what I do. I have to live. I have to protect myself. And if it’s at her expense … so what if it is? What’s Colette to me? If Mandy Coughlan offered her a better prospect I wouldn’t see her for dust, she’d have her stuff rolled up in that holdall of hers and she’d be on the next train to Brighton and Hove. At least, I hope she would. I hope she wouldn’t steal my car.

Diana is the Queen of Hearts; every time the card turns up in a spread, this week and next, she will signify the princess, and the clients’ grief will draw the card time and time again from the depth of the pack. Already the first sightings of her have been reported, peeping over the shoulder of her ancestor Charles I in a portrait at St. James’s Palace. Some people who have seen the apparition say that she is wearing a dress the colour of blood. All agree that she is wearing her tiara. If you look hard you will see her face in fountains, in raindrops, in the puddles on service station forecourts. Diana is a water sign, which means she’s the psychic type. She’s just the type who lingers and drips, who waxes and wanes, breathes in and out her tides; who, by the slow accretion of tears, brings ceilings down and wears a path into stone.